Sealioning
Pursuing a target with relentless, polite requests for evidence and explanation, never accepting any answer, so that the target is exhausted or provoked and the questioner appears reasonable.
Civility is a norm and the device turns it into a weapon. The sealion asks a question. It is answered. The sealion asks for a source. It is given. The sealion asks for the source's source, then for a definition, then whether the target is really sure, always courteously, always in public, until the target either stops replying, which looks like evasion, or snaps, which looks like incivility. Either way the sealion wins the exchange without ever making a claim that could be tested.
The name comes from a 2014 Wondermark comic in which a sea lion follows a woman home, politely demanding that she justify a passing remark. Amy Johnson's analysis for the Berkman Klein Center identified the harms: the burden of proof is shifted entirely to the target, and the audience sees only manners. Exploits Asymmetry Of Effort and the norm of good-faith debate.
Historical examples
David Malki's Wondermark strip "The Terrible Sea Lion" showed a couple pursued by a sea lion demanding, with impeccable courtesy, that they justify a remark one of them had made about sea lions. The strip was adopted within weeks as the name for the behavior it drew, and the word appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary's watch list soon after.
Malki, David. "The Terrible Sea Lion." Wondermark no. 1062, 19 September 2014. Source
Johnson's essay for the Berkman Klein Center analyzed sealioning as a form of harassment that exploits norms of debate: the demand for evidence is legitimate in itself, and its weaponization lies in the persistence, the refusal to engage with answers, and the shifting of all labor to the target while the questioner risks nothing.
Johnson, Amy. "The Multiple Harms of Sea Lions." In Perspectives on Harmful Speech Online, edited by Urs Gasser et al. Cambridge, MA: Berkman Klein Center, 2017.
In advertising and commerce
Reputation-management operators and organized fan communities use the device against critics of a product or company: every negative review or report is met with courteous, unending demands for proof, methodology, and credentials until the critic withdraws. The exchanges are indistinguishable from genuine enquiry until one counts the questions.
Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015, on trolling as a strategy against public speakers.
Find an online exchange where one person keeps asking another for proof. Count the questions. Does the questioner ever say what they think, or offer evidence of their own?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
"I'm only asking for a source. And now a source for that source. And can you define 'harm'? I just want to understand your position. Why won't you engage?"
What to notice. Polite, unending demands with no position of the questioner's own; the target's exhaustion is the goal.
After the reviewer answered six questions about her methods, the seventh asked whether she had "really" read the product manual, and the eighth repeated the first.
What to notice. Answers are never accepted; the sequence loops.
"Not trying to argue, genuinely curious: can you prove that? And that? And how do you know they're reliable?" The account has never stated a view.
What to notice. Civility as cover for shifting all the burden of proof to the target.
Sources
- Johnson, Amy. "The Multiple Harms of Sea Lions." In Perspectives on Harmful Speech Online. Berkman Klein Center, 2017.
- Malki, David. "The Terrible Sea Lion." Wondermark no. 1062, 2014.
- Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0262529877